SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc.’s big move into health care, dubbed HealthKit, has surprised a smaller health-focused startup in Australia that uses the same name.
Apple’s HealthKit, which is geared to helping developers come up with a new generation of health-focused apps, has generated a lot of excitement, especially among health professionals.
But as news of Apple’s rollout at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco spread across the world, the tech giant’s health-care push left a health-informatics firm stunned.
“I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and turned to my Apple iPhone to check my emails,” a HealthKit executive said in a blog post. “Someone had emailed me to ask whether Apple stomped all over your name or did we do a secret deal with them. Huh?!”
The blog post continued: “Apple liked our HealthKit idea so much that they have used our name and launched a new product called HealthKit.”
Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.
The controversy recalls another recent dispute, this time involving Facebook Inc. and its app called Paper.
A New York startup earlier this year complained that Facebook used the name, which it had trademarked.
FiftyThree’s Paper allows users to sketch, draw and create designs on an iPad. It won Apple’s best iPad app of the year award in 2012.
In an interesting twist, FiftyThree’s chief executive and co-founder Georg Petschnigg also found out what happened early one morning.
“Thursday morning, I woke up and was greeted by press announcements and emails from investors and friends and tweets asking if I’ve seen the news about Facebook,” Petschnigg told MarketWatch. “It was a surprise to our customers, to our partners, to our developers.”
Apple itself had its famous legal skirmishes with Apple Corps Ltd., the British company that represented the Beatles. The battle raged on and off for years before all litigation between the companies was settled in 2007.